On-site sessions

Objectives and target audience

This course targets engineers having existing knowledge about embedded Linux who wish to use the Buildroot build system to automate the build process of their embedded Linux system, make it easier and fully reproducible, benefit from thousands of pre-existing packages and create custom Linux systems perfectly adapted to their products.

At the end of this course, you will be ready to use the Buildroot to develop your own embedded Linux system and the applications running on it.

Bootlin’s expertise on Buildroot

Bootlin is a major contributor to the Buildroot upstream project, with more than 2800 patches merged as of May 2015, mostly under its former name, Free Electrons. Our engineer Thomas Petazzoni alone has contributed more than 2700 patches. He has gathered an extensive knowledge of Buildroot and its internals, being one of the primary authors of the core infrastructures of Buildroot. He is a major participant to the Buildroot community, organizing the regular Buildroot Developer Days, supporting users through the mailing list and on IRC. Last but not least, Thomas acts as an interim maintainer when the main Buildroot maintainer is not available, an indication of Thomas strong involvement in the Buildroot project.

In addition, Bootlin has used and is using Buildroot in a significant number of customer projects, giving us an excellent view of Buildroot usage for real projects. This feedback has been driving some of our Buildroot contributions over the last years.

It is this Buildroot expertise gathered both in the community and through customer projects that Bootlin is offering in this training course.

Training materials

All the training materials that we use during this course are freely available:

By the way, you can also see evaluations from previous sessions. In the same way we are transparent with our training materials, we share all the evaluations that we collect, not only the good ones.

Practical labs

Each lecture in our course is followed by a practical implementation, representing 50% to 60% of the whole course time.

Labs are performed an embedded ARM board (BeagleBone Black). You will use it to boot the root filesystems that you build with Buildroot, and to run and debug the custom applications compiled with it. This experience will be useful for dealing with any type of board.